Then followed warm handshaking and praiseful words about Mr. Philip Snowden from this lonely old lady, whom the prick of poisoned war pens had caused deeply to suffer. She loved her good Austrian husband; had been very happy in Vienna; liked the merry, kind-hearted people, and was very indignant over the extravagant falsehoods of the sensational Press. She left as soon as she recovered her passport, and I never saw her again. My name had not yet been called. A shrill scream from a railway engine, a clatter of moving wheels, and the last half-dozen of us saw the train move out without us, patiently waiting, still empty handed.
I was the very last to be served, and, as a matter of fact, was never called. Was there some mistake, I wondered? I grew cold as I thought of the possible loss of my English passport. Only later did I realize that only the Austrian one need have been handed in. I pushed past the young Austrian soldier resting upon his rifle, and walked through the Customs House into a tiny office. Nobody was there, but my open passport lay upon the table. I folded it and walked out with it. Nobody hindered me. I inquired for the next train. There was nothing till 8 o’clock. It was then 3 in the afternoon—five hours to wait! I made my way to the hotel garden and took a late lunch under the trees, sharing my Swiss cheese with a Polish musician, who divided his tinned chicken with me. We discussed the various operas in a droll mixture of French and English. He had played often in Paris, and conducted at Covent Garden, and was even then planning a return to London in the following spring. He wished greatly to improve his English, which was really very bad. “Your Engleesh it is très difficile. It have many meanings, one word. I speek never”; and he flung out both arms with a despairing gesture which nearly upset the slender garden chair on which he was sitting. He was intensely poetical, emotional, sentimental. “Ah, madame,” he exclaimed effusively, “a scene like this, the blue skies of Italy, soft music, and you—Mignon—pairfect!” And he hummed a strain from the old opera of Thomas, alternately singing and sighing until the going down of the sun, and the slow incoming of our shabby little train.
Picture a long length of incredibly dingy railway carriages with most of the windows broken, the leather straps cut away, the stuffing protruding from the torn cushions, the plumbing out of order, no lighting and no heating. Contemplate massed numbers of people of all nationalities, dirty, tired, quarrelsome, packing the carriages and crowding the corridors, filling the air with oaths and odours of unimaginable filthiness. Think of our being turned out of these carriages twice in one night, and groping our way along the railway lines in the pitch black darkness to find other carriages equally repulsive in other trains equally disreputable; a screaming babel of tongues with not a word of English deafening the ears; dragging heavy suit-cases and thrusting and elbowing with the rest of the unruly throng in the mad rush for a seat!
Eight of us found our way into one first-class carriage. It was dark, and we could not discover our companions. One man produced a piece of candle which he stuck on the table with a little melted wax. This supplied us with a dim light for several hours. After that we sat in the dark, the men roaring out comic songs to help keep up their spirits and while away the long tedious hours. The company this time included the Spaniard and his newly attached lady, two Poles, one Czech, one Hungarian, and a Frenchman, besides myself. French was the language used by all.
During two full days and nights we suffered every conceivable torture from dirt and discomfort. Offensive small creatures bit our arms and legs. We could not wash except by running out of the train when it stopped and dipping our hands in the water from the station fountain. Three hundred persons moved with the same desire would have reduced almost to zero the chances of any one. We were afraid to miss the train or lose our places, and stayed where we were. In addition to all this, the women found it wiser to stay awake during the night to save themselves from the unwelcome attentions of amorous men, unable to conceive that any business other than one could take a woman alone to Vienna in such circumstances and at such a time. This particularly disagreeable experience I do not forget I owe to the wanton discourtesy of French officials.
A curious incident took place when we were within a few miles of Vienna. The train stopped and a number of soldiers fully armed entered the train and insisted on examining the baggage of all those passengers who had not come from beyond the frontier. I observed a similar opening of bags whenever afterwards I was in the Vienna railway station. These were the soldiers of the Volkswehr attempting in this extra-constitutional way to stop profiteering in food. Thousands of people, unable to live on the ration when they could get it and generally unable to get it, were obliged to go into the country in search of food. To pay the reluctant peasants who produced it they took their jewels, their clothes, their household furnishings. The more they had the more food they could buy in this way. The supply was thereby reduced for the ordinary market. The poor suffered frightfully. The peasants preferred to sell in this fashion because the Government’s fixed price for food was very considerably below the world market-price for their products. Some of these purchasers of their stocks were gamblers in food who sold to the big hotels for fabulous prices. The people’s army determined to stop this. I learnt their method. It was certainly irregular. Was it effective? There were various opinions. It was frequently told me that the corruption had simply been transferred from one set of people to another, and that the wives and families of the soldiers of the people’s army profited at the expense of the poor of every other class. Upon one thing those in authority were agreed, that to prohibit the Volkswehr from acting in this way would mean rioting and civil war, and possibly a Bolshevik revolution!
Crime, corruption, and dishonesty are the awful first-fruits of famine in all the countries of Central Europe. It is the calamity that the best people everywhere most lament. German students must fasten their caps and coats to their pegs with chains. Boots and shoes must not be left outside hotel doors in Poland. Sheets and blankets have been stolen off the hotel beds in Vienna. Railway trucks disappear regularly in Rumania and Russia. Bribery is the order of the day. Railway officials, hotel porters, policemen, soldiers, school teachers, University professors, legislators, generals, cabinet ministers, ambassadors—there is nobody in that part of the world who cannot be tempted, and very few, I am told, who do not fall. Complacent English readers need not sniff superiorly. What would they do, if they saw their wives and children starving, and the wages for a month’s hard work not enough to buy them shoes?
An Austrian friend of mine told me of his brother’s experience on the frontiers of two Balkan states. This brother sent sixty truck-loads of goods from one country to the other. When he arrived in a passenger train at the frontier station he saw his sixty trucks, some of them broken open, standing in a siding. There were many trucks besides his own. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but railway trucks, a wilderness of trucks, thousands upon thousands, halted for no reason that was apparent.
He made his way to the station official, and anxiously inquired about it. “When will my trucks be sent on?” he asked, with much concern. “It is most important that they should go without delay.” The stationmaster grinned unsympathetically, and pointed to the forest of railway wagons stretching before them. “You want your trucks sent at once! Look you there. All those trucks came before yours. They must go before yours.” And he prepared to walk away. “But I cannot stay here for months,” replied the man in dismay. “I have very important work waiting for me. And the people in my city are badly in need of those things. If they stay here the peasants will steal everything. I beg you to send them out at once.” But he argued in vain. The official was obdurate. Seeing that what he suspected was inevitable, the baffled trader drew out his pocket-book and asked the official to name his price. And he actually handed over to this corrupt servant of the public a sum which in the money of the country at pre-war values would work out at the rate of £100 for each of his sixty trucks! For this payment the goods were dispatched within a week.